Two teenage brothers spent nearly a month clawing through the wreckage of their own apartment building in Venezuela, searching for the bodies of their mother, grandmother and younger brother. When they finally left for Colombia, they thought they were leaving the ground's violence behind them. They were wrong.
A Second Disaster, Seven Weeks Later
Winder Delfín, 17, and his younger brother Deivi, 15, had only just moved into their father's house on the outskirts of Cali when a magnitude-7.4 earthquake ripped through western Colombia on the morning of Aug. 10 — the most powerful the country has recorded this century, according to Colombia's Geological Service. It hit at 7:34 a.m. local time, its epicenter roughly three miles from San José del Palmar in the Chocó department, about 150 miles from the capital, Bogotá.
Less than two months before that, the same two brothers had been digging through the ruins of their family's 12-story building in La Guaira, Venezuela, after a pair of quakes killed their mother, younger brother and grandmother — a story first told by The New York Times and picked up widely across Latin American media.
Venezuela's disaster began on June 24, when a magnitude-7.2 foreshock struck northern Venezuela, followed about 39 seconds later by a magnitude-7.5 mainshock — the strongest the country had felt since 1900. Both quakes originated inland, in Yaracuy state west of Caracas, but the shaking devastated the coastal state of La Guaira most severely, collapsing the Delfín family's building along with hundreds of others nearby.
For nearly a month, Winder and Deivi worked alongside their father and volunteers, using little more than makeshift hand tools to move debris because heavy machinery was scarce across the disaster zone. Eventually they recovered the bodies of their mother, Yusmani, 35; their brother, Moises, 10; and their grandmother, Carmen, 69.
Starting Over in Cali
Hoping for a fresh start, the brothers relocated to Colombia to live with their father, Deivid Delfín, 44, a barber who had been working in Cali for years and sending money home.
Deivi was asleep in his father's house when the Aug. 10 quake began; he later said his first thought was that he was still dreaming. As the shaking intensified, both brothers ran into the street. Their father, who was working nearby, raced home but couldn't immediately locate them.
"The Earthquake Is Chasing Me"
Reflecting afterward on surviving two major quakes within two months, Deivi summed it up in a line that Latin American outlets seized on as a headline: "The earthquake is chasing me."
For several agonizing minutes, their father feared he was reliving the nightmare of June. Once the three were reunited unhurt, he described the moment that had gripped him: "I don't want anything to happen to my children." No one in the household was injured, though the family has since kept close to open ground whenever aftershocks rattle Cali.
The Delfín family's back-to-back ordeal sits inside a grim regional pattern that keeps growing. Venezuela's National Assembly president announced on Aug. 17 that the June earthquakes' confirmed death toll had reached 6,438, up from roughly 6,300 a week earlier. A forensic pathologist told CNN the real number was likely much higher, since makeshift morgues in La Guaira were processing hundreds of bodies a day at the peak of the crisis.
Colombia's toll, meanwhile, has climbed past the figures first reported the week of the quake. Colombia's disaster-management agency put the confirmed dead at 294 roughly a week after the Aug. 10 disaster, with around 320 people still unaccounted for — Colombia's deadliest earthquake since 1999. Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella, sworn in just days before the quake struck, told reporters efforts remained centered on the missing, even as search teams worked around the clock in Cali, Pereira and Quibdó.
For now, the Delfín brothers are among the fortunate few to have come through both disasters physically unharmed. Their story has spread across Latin American television and social media — an unusually stark illustration of how thin the margin can be for families who have already lost nearly everything once.
